Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this place, I feel you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to lift some of your own shame.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The primary observation you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while articulating coherent ideas in full statements, and never get distracted.
The next aspect you see is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of artifice and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you performed in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”
Then there was her comedy, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the heart of how female emancipation is viewed, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, choices and errors, they live in this area between pride and embarrassment. It took place, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love telling people secrets; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a link.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or urban and had a active local performance arts scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live close to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with an old flame, who she dated as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had cared for until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it turns out.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’
She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.
Ryan was amazed that her anecdote caused outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately broke.”
‘I knew I had material’
She got a job in sales, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole circuit was riddled with sexism – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny